When Kevin Ryan joined the club, the front-row tradition that had served us so well was set in cement, if you’ll excuse the pun. They called Ryan ‘Kandos’ after the cement company, because he was as hard as their product. I think Ryan was the most single-minded man I have ever met. It didn’t matter what he was doing, the eyes would narrow and the focus would be unerring. Whether it was lining up some poor victim to steamroll on the field, or studying for his law exams, or striving to make a go of a successful political career, Ryan’s commitment seemed beyond the limits of normal men.
Kevin worked hard at everything he did, knew exactly what his desired result was, and let nothing deter him. On the football field this led to some stunning performances, and his reputation as the hardest exponent of the front rower’s art was well won. He became a dual international, having already been a team-mate of Arthur Summons in Wallaby teams, and he was an integral part of the last six premierships in Saints’ run. He went to Canterbury as captain–coach after the 1966 grand final in which Saints defeated Balmain 23–4. Ironically, he was at the helm at Canterbury when they eliminated St George from the competition with a one-point win in the 1967 final—bringing to an end a St George dominance that had started to seem unbreakable.
I am often asked about the highlights of those ten grand finals I played in, and it probably seems a bit dismissive when I say they all seem to run into each other. But the fact is we all took them one at a time. We never even thought about a long run, and even when the numbers started to grow we took nothing for granted. We knew we had a good team and we were confident, not least because winning became a habit and the thought of not winning was a bit scary. The more we won, the more important winning became. But if I must list highlights, I suppose there are four years that stand out—1956, 1959, 1963 and 1965.
The first of them, in 1956, will always be special because it was won under great adversity, it broke a long drought, and it gave final vindication of a process that had developed over two or three years under Ken Kearney. The whole year was, to us at least, a big step forward in the march to professional attitudes that were the forerunner to the modern game. For me personally it was a big year. I had established myself in the Australian side over the two previous seasons, I was 24 and approaching my best years as a player, and I ended up on a Kangaroo tour at the end of the season. The grand final against Balmain was hard fought, not least because we lost our centre, Merv ‘Smacker’ Lees, thirteen minutes after the start. Merv was a very good player, but he had been through a shocking season, having broken a collarbone and his jaw earlier in the year. When he smashed the collarbone again in the grand final, there was no question of his being able to continue.
That meant playing the next 67 minutes a man short. In the era of no replacements we had to move Billy Wilson to centre and play one short in the forwards. But playing short wasn’t the big deal it would seem to people brought up on modern football. The Saints’ defensive pattern of those days had a bit up its sleeve. We worked a grid system with everybody responsible for his little area, and we had enough faith in each other to know that everybody would do his job. As for Billy, any thought his rival centres might have had about an easier afternoon was soon killed off. He tackled ferociously, ran hard with the ball, and on more than one occasion produced some nice passes for his winger that allowed him space.We won 18–12, but we scored four good tries to Balmain’s two, and really it was only some good goal-kicking from a young Keith Barnes that kept Balmain in it.
By 1957 Kearney had assumed the captain–coach role, and with Harry Bath added to the forward pack we only got better, winning against Manly in ’57 and Wests in ’58 by reasonable margins. The Wests game particularly was pretty brutal, but we were well used to that. By 1959, as we shaped up for our fourth title on the trot, the St George dynasty was really starting to take shape. This was in my opinion the best of the St George years. We went through the competition undefeated, which tells part of the story. But we were gathering a team of such proportions that rivals were just looking at us and shaking their head. That was the year that brought it all together. Kearney had had time to establish his patterns and standards, and the players who had been there for a while were all at their peak and brimming with confidence. Bob Bugden at half gave us sharpness, especially off the skill of Harry Bath, who was in his final year but was still very effective. Eddie Lumsden had slotted in brilliantly on the wing, and once we moved Poppa Clay from lock to five-eighth he gave us a new dimension as well. Then there were one or two new boys who also helped.
Reg Gasnier came up from the President’s Cup side and was instantly successful. Reg’s centre partner John Riley was another who came out of that President’s Cup team who proved a very worthy first-grader. John Raper had moved over from Newtown, and he added strengths in both attack and defence that surprised everybody. This was the peak of the St George period, blending a new range of outstanding talents with the discipline and the competitive grunt that Kearney had instilled into the St George culture over the previous eight seasons.
We drew one game against Balmain that year, and for the rest of it we were rarely challenged. But not everything fell neatly into place for us. For the grand final against Manly, both of our young centre finds Gasnier and Riley were out injured, so we moved John Raper to centre, brought up Geoff Weekes, and played my brother Peter at lock. Raper was a talent who could play anywhere and shine, and it was especially pleasing to me that Peter Provan had an absolute blinder at lock in that game. He was exhausted afterwards and more than a little knocked about, but he had contributed mightily to our 20–0 win. The score makes it look easy, but it wasn’t. Manly fought like terriers, and near the end Harry Bath and Rex Mossop got into a violent, no-holds-barred eruption that saw both of them sent off. They had been sparring partners of so many English seasons, and it was a battle that carried a lot of history.
I took over as captain–coach in 1962 when Killer Kearney couldn’t play any more and went off to coach Parramatta, taking Bob Bugden with him. We secured four more premierships before I gave it away. The 1963 encounter with Wests was probably the toughest, as outlined elsewhere, and is well remembered for the photograph it inspired. But the most emotional for me was the last of them, when we beat a spirited young South Sydney side 12–8 in 1965. At that point I had been playing in the St George jumper for sixteen seasons. I was a few months short of my 34th birthday, and already I had tried to retire a couple of times. This time I had decided definitely that the grand final would be my last game, so it was always going to be an emotional day for me. But I had been through so much over those sixteen years . . . I had had so many great experiences, that I didn’t believe anything in Rugby League could surprise me. I was wrong.
As we gathered in the dressing room before that grand final, it was much like any other. We knew there was a big crowd in the ground . . . there always was for grand finals. But our focus as always was on the task of winning, and what we had to do to achieve that. It was tense and I was nervous, as I always was. But even though I knew it was my last game, there was nothing terribly different about the way we felt about the game. As we left the dressing room and started down the steps to the field, that all changed.
The sight that greeted us was beyond belief. People were perched on top of the Hill Stand roof, somewhat dangerously it seemed to me. The overflow covered the steps to the Showground clock tower next door. Once we got on the field, there was even a delay while they cleared to a safe distance thousands of people who had jumped the fence and taken up spots on the extremities of the field. It was a sight to take the breath away, and for me it was perhaps the most emotional moment of my whole career. It was exhilarating, and once the nervousness evaporated I felt like a giant. It somehow book-ended everything we had done over the last decade or so to set this scene. Some said the fact that we won all the time took away from the interest in the competition. On this wonderful afternoon at the Sydney Cricket Ground, such a theory seemed to be ut
terly discredited.
They said there were more than 78 000 people in the ground that day, way above anything seen at the SCG before. But they could not possibly have counted them all. Worried officials had closed the gates at 1 p.m., but fans who would not be turned away simply broke down the gate and flooded in.They grabbed spots wherever they could. An English Challenge Cup final replay in the early 1950s had been played at Odsal Stadium in the north of England where they said the crowd was about 104 000. Harry Bath was captain of Warrington, the winning team that day, and he said the number was more like 130 000. It was like that at the Cricket Ground as we took on Souths, and the atmosphere was unlike anything I had experienced.
We won 12–8, scoring two tries to one, against an emerging Souths team that boasted a young Eric Simms, 23-year-old John Sattler, champion forwards like Ron Coote, Bob McCarthy and John O’Neill, and Kangaroos Michael Cleary and Jim Lisle in the backs. It was a fine team, as their subsequent premiership reign from 1967 proved. But we were well equipped too. Kevin Ryan and Poppa Clay tackled like demons and all the flair that Souths had was largely kept in check. Billy Smith played in the centres with Reg Gasnier, and of the thirteen players we fielded, I think ten had played for Australia. For me, it was a satisfying end. I know I gave it everything I had, and I thought I had a strong game. The man-of-the-match award was a nice farewell.
And so it ended. I had planned to retire after the 1963 grand final, and again after 1964, but on reflection I just wasn’t ready. I still loved training, and if I was going to keep doing that I thought I might as well put it to good use. I’m glad I did. But by 1965 I could feel that I was not quite getting to the places I used to get to. The pace and the ability to just keep going were starting to wane, and though it was probably only marginal there were times when I felt that I wasn’t keeping up . . . not the way I wanted to, anyway. There was no doubt in my mind it was time to finish. I had no complaints. Sixteen years with one club is a good run. Ten first-grade premierships is beyond belief. The Test matches and the tours were great too. But the best thing was that I was at a great club, playing alongside great men who remained friends for life. It was a unique time, not likely ever to be repeated.
17
THE GENERATION GAP
THE GENERATION GAP has been a fact of life for thousands of years. No matter the era, no matter the society, the old and the young have always seen things from different perspectives. People are fashioned by their time. To Rugby League players of years past, there is admiration and some envy for the players of today . . . and some resentment. Players of the Provan–Summons era did their share of ‘playing up’, but somehow it seemed more harmless, more discreet, than is the case today. Modern scrutiny is part of it. Today’s players have to deal with a less protective press, and the intrusion of modern technologies that give them little privacy. But the lifestyle is different too, and changing priorities have played their part.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
If I could pick one major difference between the players of our era and the players of today, I would say it is that we had a more mature outlook on life, because we had to. Rugby League players these days have so much laid on for them. The good ones have money to burn, they have to think about nothing much else than their football and the various pleasures of youth. By the headlines you see all the time, that seems to involve a bit of drinking. There are too many stories, too, about players treating women badly. I know they are isolated cases, but the many have always been judged by the worst excesses of the few, and too often today there is an imagery to Rugby League that paints it badly.
As individuals I suppose we were similar to all young men over time, but I think it is fair to say more was expected of us.The big thing was that we all got married young. I was married by the time I turned 21. Most of my contemporaries were married in their early 20s, and that forced responsibility on us that dictated the way we lived and the way we involved ourselves in sport. Immaturity was a luxury we could not afford. Maybe we were adults before our time. Compared to the way young people live today, we certainly were. We had to work hard to support a family. And we had all the natural restraints that marriage brings. It was just the way it was in those days. Our after-match celebrations always included wives, and often kids too, and by today’s standards I suppose it was all pretty sedate. Society has changed. People get married later, and there is an inevitable effect on the way a young footballer conducts himself.
Our upbringing also had a lot to do with the way we approached life. My generation grew up without a lot of money. The Depression, and then the war, had seen to that. It was also a time before the modern imperatives of economic growth, shareholder value and corporate dominance had taken hold. I grew up in a very basic house. It was pretty bad, really. But in those days women didn’t as a rule join the workforce, and Mum was always at home to care for the kids. It made a difference, and it fashioned the outlook that we took into early adulthood. We had a drink, but drugs were something you took when you were sick, and then only if you absolutely had to.
By the standards of the modern professional footballer, I suppose we were very conservative.
There were exceptions who occasionally got legless, but even then they were pretty harmless. Drinking as such was not a taboo, and most would certainly have a beer after training and after games. Maybe the constraints put on players today are part of the problem. Denied a beer as part of their normal social activities, when they do get off the leash they go mad. Mind you, I would hate to label the great body of modern players as badly behaved. I have enjoyed talking to many of them at medal presentations and the like over the years, and most are good young men who apply themselves very professionally to their football. Their self-discipline is admirable. But the constraints of work and marriage meant we didn’t have time to get up to much in our day. They do.
NORM PROVAN
A modern footballer leads a totally different life from the sort of life we led, and it’s hard to compare the eras. When I started playing first-grade Rugby League, the introduction of television in Australia was still five years away, and things like smart phones and mobiles were science fiction. We read about ‘two-way wrist radios’ in Dick Tracy comics. For entertainment we huddled around the radio to listen to quiz shows run by Jack Davey or Bob Dyer. We caught the tram to work, stood up for God Save the Queen at the pictures and had bonfires and crackers—fireworks—on Empire Night. Sport was played purely for sport’s sake, not as a career path, and life itself surrounded lots of simple pleasures. We shopped with pounds, shillings and pence, and not a lot of them.
After five years in first grade, I was in our first winning premiership side before television started, and we seemed to get through a lot of games without having to wait an age for video replays. I can remember sitting in the back yard in 1957 as just about everybody else in the world was doing and watching a little speck of light going across the sky. This was Russia’s Sputnik, the first space vehicle ever launched, which stuck in orbit for a short time but started the space race. From then on, man-made satellites were a part of life. I hear now of coaches using GPS technology to monitor their players at training, and running computer analyses of everything that happens. I wonder if the Russians ever envisaged as they got Sputnik up that they would be playing their part in organising the Bulldogs’ tactics for the 2012 grand final.
It’s another world, but despite all these changes I can’t imagine myself ever having to worry about a satellite in space to help me coach a football team. The thing is, though, I don’t pretend to understand the way they go about things these days, with their hyperbaric chambers and their ice baths and everything else. All I see is what is on the field and what is in the papers, and there is much of it I like and much of it I don’t like. The headlines that players all too often make these days are one of the things I don’t like.
I have never been much of a drinker. Even in my days at Saints, when all the boys went to the Carlton pub after every training s
ession, I was by no means a regular. Occasionally I would go just to be part of it, and I would sit on a soda water or something all night.When I was captain–coach I would often announce the team up there, when everybody was relaxed. But I never really took to drinking beer, not for any conscientious objection but simply because I didn’t care much for the taste of it. But I never had any issue with the drinking that went on at Saints in those days. I know all the stories about ‘Changa’ Langlands and Billy Smith, and sometimes Johnny Raper too, but if they sometimes overdid the carousing, as their reputation suggests, they certainly didn’t do it when I was around. Their commitment to our team and to the training that we did was better than most, and I never had a complaint with any of them.
We entertained ourselves in those days in a more settled way than I think is the case with today’s young players. The great majority of the players in those teams were married, and the wives were a part of everything we did.We had a very good spirit that embraced both the players and the girls, and we did lots of things together, both in the time we were actively involved in the game and afterwards. ‘Friends for life’ is a much-used term, but that’s exactly the way it was with us. The drinking I did, in fact, was mostly with the girls. While the boys were breasting the bar at the club downing schooners, I would have the odd ‘Moscow Mule’, named presumably for the kick it gave you. It was a delightful combination of vodka and milk that the girls loved as well, and for me it went down a lot more easily than beer. Sometimes when I drank with the boys I would have one of those as well, and nobody ever gave me a hard time about it.
The Gladiators Page 13
